On one desperately boring 1991 morning in November, Jarmila sat, a cup of cheap instant coffee in hand, in an armchair, and as she popped her second Ibalgin pill, she flipped through the newest TV channels. After a while, a music video on MTV grabbed her attention. A couple of beaten-up, tattooed cheerleaders performed their mundane routine for a bunch of apathetic high schoolers. Behind them stood a three-person band, the frontman’s face completely obscured by his unwashed blonde hair. Jarmila stared at the screen of her parents’ Tesla Colour 4401 with fascination, her tired eyes fixated on the anxious crowd in this bizarre, and to her own experience with the Eastern European school system in the 1980s, so foreign pep rally. Later that day, she went out, walked across the whole town to the train station, bought a ticket to Prague, went into a record store in the top half of Wenceslaus Square, and bought a cassette tape with a naked baby swimming on the cover.
By the time European audiences got to see it, the video for Nevermind’s lead single had already taken over America’s late-night MTV (where it debuted on September 29 around one in the morning as part of MTV’s 120 Minutes), proving so popular that the programming department moved it to more public-access daytime slots and finally, on October 14th, moving it to its Buzz bin and playing it in adverts for the station.
Sometime in July, before the beginning of Nirvana’s next American tour, Cobain wrote down a list of things needed for the shoot. His original vision included a Mercedes-Benz with a few other old cars, an abandoned mall with a jewellery shop, lots of fake jewellery, a cast of hundreds of students with one custodian, and six black cheerleaders’ outfits with the anarchist A on the chest. It was no secret he wanted to direct the video himself, but the studio was not ready to let him do it. He also later cited The Ramones’ 1980 song Rock’n’Roll High School and the 1979 Jonathan Kaplan cult classic film Over the Edge as sources of inspiration for the video.
The cast ended up being smaller than originally planned. Behind-the-scenes information suggests that about 50–60 people filled the bleachers on the gym set. All the students were played by real Nirvana fans, whom the band recruited two days before the shoot by handing out flyers at the end of their set at The Roxy Theatre in L.A.
The clip was shot about a month later on August 17th, 1991, at stage 6 of a cold, secluded warehouse of GMT Studios in Culver City, California. The shoot was cheap ($33,000), not uncommon for a label-supported indie band in the early 1990s. The filming was scheduled to begin at 11:30 am, and it proved to be quite challenging right away. Cobain, dissatisfied with the set from first glance, refused to lip-sync the song, leaving the first-time director Samuel Bayer angrily shouting at him with his megaphone. “I just remember walking on the day of the shoot and looking at the set, because I had a meeting with Sam Bayer and told him what I wanted. I drew pictures of it, and I walked in, and it wasn’t what I wanted. It looked like a Time-Life commercial to me. You know this kind of commercial where people are trying to sell aspirin or something, or an AT&T commercial; it looked too contemporary,” Cobain recalled in a December 1993 interview with MTV.
The set wasn’t the only part of the original concept that Bayer smoothed over and polished. In Cobain’s mind, the cheerleaders were “ugly and overweight”, but Bayer decided to cast women from local script clubs who were more conventionally beautiful and resembled the cheerleader stereotype all Americans were familiar with. Courtney Love (Cobain’s wife and front woman of the grunge band Hole) has also stated that Cobain wanted more diverse casting, including Black students.
According to one cast member, the shoot was “basically listening to the song for eight hours straight with everyone growing more bored with every other take while they gave us Spaghetti Bolognese sandwiches.” They also recalled that there was a cardboard guitar replica for Cobain to destroy, but instead of breaking, it just flipped around, so Cobain asked the fans to vote on whether he should destroy his real one. After the crown voted no, he then proceeded to smash it into pieces. This moment is also sometimes cited as the one where the frustration on the set reached its limit. With an hour left to the wrap, almost everybody from the band to the crew was exhausted by the lengthy process. So, when Cobain encouraged the fans to mosh as if it was a real show and someone asked the director whether they could destroy the set, he responded with, “What do I care?”
“So all the kids came down from the stands, and it’s all real, you know? The last thirty seconds of that video are those kids really destroying the set. I look through the eyepiece on my camera, and I go—that’s it—that’s amazing. I filmed it, and it became the end of that video,” remembered Bayer in a 2007 documentary. And it ended up being this last hour of filming that the finished video pulled most frames from. The guy hanging on the basketball scythe, the one running around with Grohl’s high hat, many crowd surfers, and Cobain waving a tapestry of Jesus Christ above his head all of it a raw catharsis.
The video then went through a few re-edits with Bayer in charge of the process. When Cobain saw the final product, he flew to L.A. and edited the final version himself. Looking at the two versions side by side, Cobain reduced the number of adult characters who appear, leaving only the janitor. After all, the original concept was centred around him (Cobain himself was a janitor at his own school). Cobain also famously added his out-of-focus, brightly lit screaming face at the end, forcing you to look straight in his eyes and address his disillusions directly. The final version also includes more scenes of the chaos that came with the trashing of the set and more blurred faces letting loose.
“I was mesmerised by it,” Jarmila told me when we spoke last weekend in her squeaky clean kitchen with papaya orange walls. “I have never seen anything like it. It was like the first time I saw my feelings represented in any type of media. I went to music gigs, I jumped around like crazy, and I felt so pissed off anytime I even walked into a school gym. To see some of the angst and alienation I and my friends at the time felt reflected like that, it really made a difference to me.“
Since the year of its release, the video, as well as the song itself, has become symbolic of a decade that was focused on not caring about anything too much, about not trying too hard. Cobain’s suicide only three years later shattered that mindset. It became very apparent how much of himself he put into his art, how deeply he wanted people to understand every single word he screamed in their face, and how frustrated he was at the shallow mainstream public interpretation of them.
Even thirty-four years later, we still hold the belief that to not care is somehow aspirational. We constantly undermine our achievements, interests, and anything that could show just how deeply we want to be appreciated and loved. Cynicism and irony are now the catchiest guitar riffs in our life.
And if the behind-the-scenes story of Smells Like a Teen Spirit shows us something, it’s what genuine emotions and passions can do with a rigit format and a few mosquitos.
Sources: Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit (Official Music Video)
https://www.npr.org/2011/09/23/140739014/smells-like-teen-spirit-still-strange-and-beautiful https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334534161_Smells_Like_Teen_Spirit_Kurt_Cobain_Voice_of_Generation_X_and_creator_of_Grunge
https://www.loudersound.com/features/here-we-are-now-entertain-us-the-inside-story-of-nirvanas-smells-like-teen-spirit-video
https://www.nme.com/features/nirvana-s-smells-like-teen-spirit-10-awesome-things-you-never-knew-about-the-video-1415315
https://www.loudersound.com/bands-artists/nirvana-smells-like-teen-spirit-video-two-billion-views
https://www.solist.blog/list-of-things-for-the-smells-like-teen-spirit-music-video/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9U8oOSHWw4
Including writers own interviews with members of Generation X and Nirvana fans.
Article by Inka Andera
You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg
(Opinion Piece)
